any practical reasons to have unified tracks?

To answer 3. first, one easy way is to assign different track colours to MIDI tracks and then save your track template. You can then insert from track template every time you want a MIDI track, you can assign a keyboard shortcut for this if you wish. As for the reasoning ... I'd answer first by asking how the Sonar way brings any advantages? I suspect you only find it strange because it's different. And of course you can keep your MIDI and audio tracks separate if you wish. Here are some of the benefits of unified tracks that come to mind immediately, I'm sure there are others: - You might have a MIDI drum loop to which you want to add concurrently a WAV file of a drumbeat at certain times. You can put them both on the same track, together, so tat as one moves so does the other. - Output from both MIDI and audio tracks can be routed to the same Bus, for example for reverb or other FX. - Output from a MIDI track can be used to directly control a sidechain FX (such as gate or compressor) on an audio track. - REAPER gives you genuine parameter modulation for complete sidechain control. For example, you can control any aspect of an audio track's (such as amount of delay or EQ gain on the track) by any aspect of the MIDI trcak's behavior. Oh yes, and welcome to REAPER by the way! ;)

I do mix midi and audio in the same track. My routing for multichannel, multi-output instrument plugins lets me have e.g. the midi for channel 1 plus it's dedicated audio-out from the plug on one single track, so for a 16 channel instrument I only need to have 16 tracks (plus a foldertrack) without losing control on neither the audio, nor the midi. It's a gift I wouldn't ever want to miss again. I don't know of any other DAW where this is possible. I would even like to go a step further and have the possibility to open an audio and a midi input on one track at the same time. That way I could play (and record) my guitar through an ampsim and record expression pedal movement (e.g. for a wahwah) on one and the same track. (I do record both on the same track right now, but need a helper track for the midi input and send the midi to the main guitar track...) The visual 'issue' goes away as soon as you have items with data on the track. MIDI and audio are easy to distinguish by the visual preview of their content. MIDI items show an approximation of the notes and controller events and audio items of course a waveform.

To avoid frustration, read these threads before you try: and . In post 18 of the first thread I attached a track template (dont care for the attachment of post 13, it has some flaws). Have fun EDIT, please also see my next post in this thread for a new link.

Ooops, the template is not in those threads I linked to, but in this one: Yes, feedback routing has to be enabled, so you have to be careful with further routing to not route the same audio back to where it came from. Never encountered a problem so far. And I have to disable synchronous FX multiprocessing.

hq9000. you immediately know which are audio traks cos of the audio waveform. theres nothing to stop you haveing your own project template. seperating the midi traks from the audio traks. i suspect what throws people is how you can set things up anyway you want. for example in a typical song one might think of three levels of traks. 1. the ruff guide traks. 2. the bed trak rhythm section. 3. lead up front traks. thus if you wanted you could set up a project template accordingly and precede each trak name with the letter "m" for midi trak or "a" for audio trak. OR you could for example seperate groups of traks with a free blank trak. and name it for example bed traks midi with the midi traks underneath. or bed traks audio with the audio traks underneath. just some ideas.

Options/preferences/appearence/tint track pannel backgrounds. Cheers

I think the main advantage of universal tracks is routing. Since they're all the same you can route anything anywhere. The disadvantages of not having distinct classes have been explored ad nauseum... harder to do certain things with certain tracks since they're all the same and there's no way to easily identify one over another. You can't really hide all midi tracks since there are no midi tracks... or group tracks or FX track classes. And of course the main disadvantage to not having a midi track class is not being able to mix and meter CC's from the mixer. Like most, this method has it's up and down sides. If the majority of users feel the upside is greater than the downside then it should remain as it is. I'm pretty sure that's the case. ;) Even the flies flying around this dead horse are dying... I don't see track classes in Reaper's future.

Besides color coding, it would be cool to have icons (midi/audio/whatever) on the tracks. Visual organization and clarity is the one part of the problem. Assignable icons would also help free up color coding for different categories (e.g. vocals, bass, drums etc)